The harassment survey came about after tightened federal regulations and two episodes of previous years, in which Harvard instructors were disciplined for harassing students made the issue impossible for administrators to ignore.

The tenure appointment followed a nationwide increase in the number of women pursing careers as professors. "We're seeing the great wave of women who entered graduate school in the late 60s come up for tenure for the first time now," says Nancy Maull, a Faculty administrator who monitors affirmative action.

And the women's studies search came at the tail-end of a great rise in the area's prominence in American universities. "The field is much more developed at other universities than it is here," says one professor. "Harvard's been a little late in coming to it."

Some observers suggested the autumn's good news about women may also have concealed a measure of bad news. Says Elizabeth Young '85, the outgoing president of the Radcliffe Union of Students: "It's great to have a survey of sexual harassment but look what its showed." The report, says Young, "proved definitively how serious a problem harassment is and how inadequately it's been addressed."

Among the survey's most starting statistics: 49 percent of all female junior faculty members reported experiencing sexual harassment, including 17 percent who reported explicit or physical advances.

Others cautioned against taking too much encouragement from the fall's tenure figures. Nathan I. Huggins, chairman of the Afro-American Studies Department, suggests that Harvard tenures so few professors each year that isolating any single year's statistics can be misleading. "It may be another decade before another woman is promoted to tenure," he says.

And Marlyn M. Lewis '70, the assistant dean of the College responsible for a wide range of women's issues, says the Faculty still has a long way to go before it "really represents some spectrum of the country" in its quotient of tenured women.

Officials say Harvard's long-term goal is to mirror the national pool of women with Ph.D's in its tenured ranks. Currently about 25 percent of the nation's advanced-degree holders are women, an all-time high. But because of Harvard's slow pace of filling tenured slots, the Faculty won't be able to reflect that statistic for at least 30 years, says Lewis.

Associate Dean of the Faculty Phyllis Keller agrees. "There are certain practical realities--like the dean can't fire half the Faculty," she says.

Nevertheless to Lewis, the fall's various developments are not unrelated. "I think they're all part of something bigger," she says. "There's clearly a general change--that's been in the growing stages for a long time and is only now bearing fruit--as far as making Harvard belong to women."

The key to that goal is hiring more women in influential positions--especially tenured faculty posts, says Lewis. And although she points out that Harvard has decades of work ahead of it in this effort, she argues that right now, "women are caring about Harvard and feeling full members of the place more so than even five years ago."

The influence of women on the Faculty, she says, can be seen in such diverse areas as the new parity women's athletic teams have reached in official financial support and widening access for women scholars in the hard sciences.

Like Lewis, the RUS's Young links the fall's news about women. "There's definitely a common factor," she says, "There issues are often fragmented but it's important to put them all together. Together, these advances indicating how much further there is to go."